Snodgrass and Other Illusions

Second Journey of the Magus

HE TRAVELLED THE SAME WAY, but there was heat this time instead of the dark of winter, and nothing of the lands which he had passed through more than thirty years before was the same. Gone were the quiet houses, the patchwork fields, the lowland shepherds offering to share their skins of wine. Instead, there were goats unmilked, bodies bloating in ditches, fruit left to rot on the branch. And people were fleeing, armies were marching. Fear and dust hazed the roads.

He followed hidden tracks. He camped quietly and alone. He lit no fire, ate raisins and dry bread. He spoke no prayers. Although an old man, weak and unarmed, he felt resignation rather than fear. His camel was of far greater value than he was, and he knew he could never to return to Persia. At least, alive. The Emperor, if he ever knew of his journey, would regard it as treason, and the Zoroastrian priests would scourge his body for honouring a false God.

He came at last to the Euphrates. There were palms and green hills rising from the marshes, but the villages all around were empty. He sat down by the broad blue river as his camel drank long and loud, and quietly mourned for his two old friends. Melchior, who had first read of that coming birth in the scriptures of a primitive tribe. Gaspar, who had found the right quadrant in the stars to pilot their way. And, he, Balthazar, who had accompanied them because he had ceased to believe in anything, and wished to see the emptiness of all the world and the entire heavens proven with his own eyes. That, he supposed, was why he had chosen to bring an unguent for embalming corpses as his gift for this king he never expected to find.

A boat was moored, nudging anxiously into the current as if it feared to be left alone in this greenly desolate place. It was evening by the time Balthazar had refound his resolve and persuaded his half-hobbled camel to board the vessel with murmured spells, then made small obeisance to the gods of the river, and poled into the inky currents beyond the reeds. The sky in the west darkened as sprites of wind played around him, but, even as the moon rose and stars strung the heavens, even as he re-moored the boat on the far side and set off across a land which soon withered to desert, the western horizon ahead remained aflame.

He knew enough about war to understand the dark eddies and stillnesses which he had already witnessed on his journey, but it seemed to him that the battleground he encountered as the dawn sun rose at his back and brightness glared ahead was the stillest, darkest place on earth. All Persians should be grateful, he supposed, that this resurgent Hebrew kingdom had turned its wrath against the Empire of Rome. A strategist would even say that war between powerful neighbours can only bring good to your own lands—he had heard that very thing said in the bars of Kuchan—but that presupposed some balance in the powers which fought each other. There was no balance here. There was only death.

Blackened skulls. Blackened chariots. Heaps of bone, terribly disordered. The way the Roman swords and shields were melted as if put to the furnace. The way the helmets were caved in as if crushed between giant fists. Worst still, somehow, was the sheer value of what had been left here, ignored, discarded, when every battlefield Balthazar had ever witnessed or heard of in song was a place ripe for looting. This great Roman army, with its engines and horses, with the linked plate metal walls of irresistibly fearless men and raining arrows, had been obliterated as if by some fiery hurricane. And then everything simply left. It was hard to find a way across this devastation. He had to blindfold his camel and sooth the moaning creature with quiet visions of oases to keep it calm. He wished that he could blindfold himself, but, strangely, there was nothing here to offend his mouth and nose. There were no flies even as his feet sunk through puddled offal and he climbed mountains of bones. The only smell was a faint one of some odd kind of perfume, such as the waft you might catch from the beyond the curtains of the temple of some unknowable god.

The noon sun was hot, but the blaze in the west had grown brighter still. He remembered that star, the one which Gaspar had been so certain would somehow detach itself from the heavens to lead them. Had it now reignited and settled here on earth? Was that what lay ahead? He swathed his face against the burning light and drifting ash. It seemed to him now that he’d always been destined to re-take this journey at the end of his life. If nothing else, it was due as penance.

The three men who had taken this journey before had thought themselves wise, and were acknowledged in their own lands as priests, kings, magi. Then, unmistakably even to Balthazar’s dubious gaze, a single star had hovered before them, and did not move as the rest of the heavens revolved. It went beyond all reason. It destroyed everything he understood, but the people they asked as they passed through this primitive outpost of the Roman Empire could speak of nothing in their ragged tongue but vague myths of an ancient king called David, and of a great uprising to come. They did not understand the stars, or the ancient scripts. They only understood the gold which the three magi laid upon their palms.

Finally, though, they reached the city called Jerusalem. It was the administrative capital of this little province, and truly, from its fallen walls and the pomp with which the priests of the local god bore themselves, it did seem to be the remnant of a somewhere which had once been far greater. The local tetrarch was called Herod, and even to the cultured eyes of the three magi, his palace was suitably grand. It was constructed on a sheer stone platform with high walls looking out across the city, and surrounded by groves of fine trees, bronze fountains, glittering canals. Thus, the three magi thought, as they were led through mosaic-studded halls, does Rome honour and sustain those who submit to its power.

They were put at their ease. They were given fine quarters, soft clean beds and hot baths. Silken girls brought them sherbet. Dancing girls danced barefoot. Here, at last, they felt that they were being treated as the great emissaries that they truly were. Herod, bloated on his throne, struck Balthazar as little man made large. But he could converse in Greek, and the three magi could think of no reason why they should not ask for his advice as to the furtherance of their quest. And that advice was given—generously, and without pause. Astrologers were summoned. Holy books were unfurled, and the bearded priests of this region who clustered around them agreed that, yes, such was the prophecy of which these ancient scriptures spoke—of a new king, of the lineage of a king called David who had once made this city great in the times of long ago. The three magi were sent on their way from Jerusalem with fresh camels, full bellies and happy hearts. Herod, they agreed, as they rode toward the star which now seemed even brighter in the firmament, might be a slippery oaf, but at least he was a hospitable one.

The roads were clogged. It was the calling, apparently, of a census, despite it being the worst time of the year. Not an auspicious moment, either, Balthazar couldn’t help thinking, for a woman to travel if she was heavy with child. He discussed again with Melchior as they pushed with the crowds and the sleeting rain past the camps of centurions and lines of crucified criminals. Remind me again—is this child supposed to be a man, or a god? But the answer he got from his friend remained meaningless. For how can the answer be both yes, and yes? How can something be both? Difficulties, then, with finding somewhere to reside, for all the documents of passage Herod had so kindly given them, and Gaspar’s navigation was no longer so sure. For all that this star glowed out at them like a jewel set in the firmaments both day and night, no one could offer guidance on their quest, and none bar a few wandering shepherds seemed to notice that the star was even there.

Then they came at last to a small town by the name of Bethlehem, and it was already night, and it was clear that whatever this strange light in the heavens signalled had happened here. They enquired at the inns. They spoke once again to the so-called local wise men, although this time, more warily. They made no mention of gods or kings. At the start of this journey, Balthasar had imagined himself—although he had never believed it would truly happen—being led to some glowing presence which would rip down the puny veils of this world. But he realised now that whatever it was that they sought would be painfully humble, and all three magi had began to fear for the fate of the family involved.

It was a stable, at the back of the cheapest and most overcrowded of all the inns. They would have been sent away entirely had not Melchior known to ask as the door was being slammed in their faces about a family from a town called Nazareth. So they had reached the place toward which the star and the prophecies long been leading them, on the darkest and most hopeless of nights, and in coldest time of the year. There was mud, of course, and there was the ordure. There was little shelter. Precious little warmth, as well, apart from that which came from the fartings and breathings of the animals. The woman was still exhausted from birth, and she had laid the baby amid the straw in a feeding trough, and the man seemed…not, it struck Balthasar, the way any proud husband would. He was dumbstruck, and in awe.

They should, by rights, have simply turned and left. Offered their apologies for the disturbance, perhaps, and maybe a little money to help see this impoverished family toward their next meal. Balthasar thought at first that that was all Melchior planned to do when he stepped forward with a small bag of gold. But then he had fallen to his knees on this filthy floor before the child in that crude cot. And Gaspar, bearing a bowl of incense, did the same. These were the gifts, Balthasar now remembered, that his two friends had always talked of bearing. Now, he felt he had no choice but to prostrate himself as well, and offer the gift which he had never imagined he would be called to present. Gold, for a king, and frankincense, for a man of God—yes, those gifts were understandable, if the prophecies were remotely true. But myrrh symbolised death, if it symbolised anything at all. Then the baby had stirred, and for a moment, Balthasar had felt he was part of something. And that something had lingered in his mind and his dreams through all the years since.

He had spoken about that moment as Melchior lay on his deathbed back in Persia. Yes, his old friend agreed in dry whisper, perhaps a god really had chosen to manifest itself in that strange way, and in that strange place. Perhaps he had even moved the heavens so that they could make that long journey bearing those particular gifts. But Melchior was fading rapidly by then, falling into pain and stinking incontinence which the castings of spells and prayers could not longer assuage. As his friend spasmed in rank gasps, Balthasar couldn’t bring himself to frame the other question which had robbed him of so many nights of sleep. For if that baby really was the manifestation of an all-powerful god, why had that god chosen to make them the instruments of the terror which occurred next?

The three magi had left the stable at morning under a sky doused in rain, and they knew without speaking that they must return quietly and secretly to Persia, and should spread no further word. But, through their vain discussions in Herod’s opulent palace, it was already too late. Rumours of a boy king was the last thing this restless province needed, and the remedy which Herod enacted was swift and efficient in the Roman way. Word came like a sour wind after the three supposedly wise men that every male child recently born in Bethlehem had been slaughtered, and they returned to their palaces in Persia half-convinced that they had seen the manifestation of a great god, but certain that that god was dead.

So it had remained in all the years since, through Balthasar’s increasing decrepitude, and the loss of his wives, and deaths of his oldest friends. But then had come rumour from that same territory in the west of a man said to have been born in the very place and manner which they had witnessed, who was now performing great miracles, and proclaimed himself King of the race the Romans called the Jews. It had been four years, as Balthasar calculated, since this man had emerged as if from the same prophesies which Melchior had once shown him on those ancient scrolls. And seemed to Balthasar now that this last journey had always been predestined, and that the only thing which he had been waiting for was the imminence of his own death.

He was entering a green land now. It was fertile and busy. The creeks bubbled with water so pure and sweet that feared both he and his camel would never stop drinking. The roadside bloomed with flowers more abundant than those tended in his own place grounds. Fat lambs baaed. The air grew finer and clearer with every breath. All the dust and pain and disappointment of his journey was soon cleansed away.

The first angel Balthasar witnessed was standing at a crossroads, and he took it at first to be tall golden statute until he realised that it wasn’t standing at all. The creature hovered two or three spans in the air above the fine-set paving on four conjoined wings flashing with many glittering eyes, and it had four faces pointing in each of the roadway’s four directions, which were the faces of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. Its feet were also those of an ox. Somehow Balthasar knew that this creature belonged to the first angelic order known as Cherubim. There was a singing in his ears as he gazed up at the thing, which was too beautiful to be horrible. He didn’t know whether to bow down in tears, or laugh out loud for joy.

“Old man, you have come as a pilgrim.” It was merely a statement, sung by a roaring choir. “You may pass.”

This land of Israel truly was a paradise. He had never seen villages so well tended, or lands so fecund. Trees bowed down with fruit even though it was too early in the season. Lambs leapt everywhere. The cattle were amiable and fat. He felt, amongst many other feelings, ridiculously hungry, but withheld from plucking from the boughs of the fig trees until he saw the many other travellers and pilgrims feasting on whatever took their fancy, and farmers freely offering their produce—plump olives, fine pomegranates, warm breads, cool wines, glistening haunches of meat—to all.

He knew night was coming from the darkening of the eastern sky behind him, by the west glowed far too bright for any visible sunset to occur. A happy kind of tiredness swept over him. Here, he would merrily have cast himself down in these hedgerows, which would surely be soft as a feather bed. But a farmer came running to him from out of the sleek blue twilight, and insisted on the hospitality of his home. It was a square building, freshly whitened, freshly roofed. Olive lamps glittered, and the floor inside was dry and newly swept. He had never encountered somewhere so simple, yet so beautifully kept. The man himself was beautiful as well, and yet more beautiful were his wife and children, who sang as they prepared their meal, and listened gravely to Balthasar’s tale of his journey and the terrible things he had witnessed, yet laughed when he had finished, and hugged him, and broke into prayer.

All he was seeing, they assured him, were the sad remnants of a world which would soon be extinguished as the Kingdom of their Saviour spread. Their eldest son was fighting in the armies of Jesus the Christos, which they knew that he would be victorious, and they did not fear for his death. Even in a house as joyous as this, that last statement struck Balthasar as odd, but he kept his council as they sat down to eat on beautifully woven rugs, and the meal was the best he had ever tasted. Then, there was more song, and more prayer. When the man of the house finally beckoned Balthasar, he imagined it to show him the place where he would bed. Through a small doorway, and beyond a curtain there was, indeed, a raised cot, but a figure already occupied it; that of an elderly woman who lay smiling with hands clasped and eyes wide open as if gripped in eager prayer.

“Go on, my friend” Balthasar was urged. “This is my grandmother. You must touch her.”

Balthasar did. Her skin was cold and waxy. Her eyes, for all their shine, were unblinking. She was plainly dead.

“Now, you must tell me how long you think she’s been thus.”

Troubled, but using his not inconsiderable knowledge of physic, Balthasar muttered something about three to four hours, perhaps less, to judge by the absence of odour, or the onset of rigor in the limbs.

The man clapped his hands and laughed. “Almost two years! Yet look at her. She is happy, she is perfect. All she awaits is the Lord’s touch to bring about her final return in the eternal kingdom which will soon be established. That is why we Christians merrily do battle against all who oppose us, for we know that we will never have to fear death…”

That night, Balthasar laid uneasily in the softness of the rugs the family had prepared for him, and was slow to find sleep. This clear air, the happy lowing of the cattle, the endless brightness in the west…And now the family were singing again, as if out of their dreams, and joined with their voices came the softer croak of the old woman, happily calling with emptied lungs for her resurrection from undecayed death. In the morning, Balthasar felt refreshed for all his restlessness, and beast the family led from their stables was barely recognisable as the surly creature which had borne him all the way from Persia. The camel’s pelt was sleek as feathers. Its eyes were wise and brown and compassionate in the way of no beast of burden Balthasar had ever known. He almost expected creature to speak to him, or join with this family as they broke into song and they waved him on his way.

Thus, laden with sweetmeats and baked breads, astride a smooth, uncomplaining mount on a newly softened saddle, Balthasar completed the last leg of his strange second journey to Jerusalem. The brightness before him had now grown so intense that he would have feared for his sight, had that light come from the sun. But he could see clearly and without pain—see far more clearly than he had ever seen, even in the happiest memories of his youth.

The encampment of a vast army lay outside the greats city’s gleaming jasper walls. Angels of other kinds to the creature he had first witnessed—some were six-winged and flickered like lampflames and were known as the Seraphim; others known as the Principalities wore crowns and bore sceptres; stranger still were those called the Ophanim, which were shaped like spinning wheels set with thousands of eyes—supervised the mustering and training with the voices of lions. The soldiers themselves, Balthasar saw as he rode down among them, were like no soldiers he had ever seen. There were bowed and elderly men. There were cripples. There were scampering children. There were women heavy with child. Yet even the seemingly lowliest and most helpless possessed a flaming sword which could cut as cleanly through rock as it did though air, and a breastplate seemingly composed the same glowing substance which haloed the city itself. Seeing all these happy, savage faces, hearing their raucous song and laughter as they went about their everyday work, Balthasar knew that these Christian armies wouldn’t cease advancing once they had driven their old overlords back to Rome. They would turn east, and Syria would fall. So would Egypt, and what was left of Babylon. Persia would come next, and Bactrai and India beyond. They would not cease until they had conquered the furthest edges of the world

He entered the city through one of its twelve great, angel-guarded gates. The paving here was composed of some oddly slippery, brassy metal. Dismounting from his camel, Balthasar stooped to stroke its surface just as many other new arrivals were doing. Like all the rest, he cried out, for the streets of this new Jerusalem truly were paved with gold. The light was intense, and there were temples everywhere, as you might find market stalls, whorehouses or watchman’s booths in any other town. He doubted if it rained here, but the golden guttering ran red with steaming gouts of blood. The fat lambs, cattle and fowls seemed not to fear death as they were led by cheering, chanting crowds toward altars of amethyst, turquoise and gold. Balthasar, who had dropped his camel’s rein in awed surprise, looked back in sudden panic. But it was too late. The crowds were already bearing the happily moaning creature away.

Most of the people here in Jerusalem wore fine but anonymous white raiments, some splattered with blood, but Balthasar recognised the faces and languages of Rome, Greece and Egypt amid the local Aramaics. Yet even when strange pilgrims of the darker and paler races he encountered spoke to him, he discovered that he understood every word.

The story which he heard from all of them was essentially the same. Of how two figures had appeared atop the main tower of what had then been the largest temple in this city on the morning of the Sabbath four years earlier. Of how one of the figures had been dressed in glowing raiments, and the other in flames of dark. And how the glowing figure had cast himself as if to certain death before the gathering crowds, only for the sky to rent from horizon to horizon as many varieties of angels flew down to bear him up. Even the most conservative of the local priests could not deny the supernatural authority of what they had witnessed. When the same figure had arrived the following day at the closed and guarded city on a white horse in blazing raiments and demanded entry, Pilate the Roman prefect, who was subsequently crucified for his treachery, ordered that the gates be flung open before they were broken down.

Everything had changed in the four years since. Jerusalem was now easily the most powerful city in the eastern Mediterranean, and Jesus the Christ or Christos was the most powerful man. If, that was, he could conceivably be regarded as a man at all. Balthasar heard much debate on this subject amid the happy babble as work toward celebrating his glory went on. Man, or god, but surely not both? It was, he realised, the same question he had asked Melchior many times on that earlier journey. He’d never received what he felt was a satisfactory answer then, and the concept still puzzled him now.

The city walls were still being reconstructed in places from more huge blocks of jasper which angels of some more muscular kind bore roped to glowing clouds. For all the imposing depth and breadth of the finished portions, Balthasar could not imagine that this city would ever be required to defend itself. Many of the buildings, for all their spectacular size and ornamentation, were also works in progress, raised from the support of what looked like ridiculously frail scaffoldings, or perhaps merely faith alone, as new gildings and bejewellings were encrusted over surfaces already bright with gems. The Great Temple, which rose from the site of the far lesser building from which Christ had thrown himself down, was the most vast and impressive building of all. Great blocks of crystal so sheer you could almost walk into them formed turrets which seemed composed of fire and air.

Controlled and supervised by angels, crowds flooded the wide marble steps beneath arches of sardine and jasper. Most of those who came to worship were whole and healthy, but some, Balthasar noticed, bore terrible injuries, or were leprous. Others, perhaps impatient for the promised resurrection, bore the dead with them on crude stretchers, variously rotted or well-preserved. As was the case throughout the entire city, there were none of the expected smells. Instead, that fragrance which he had first encountered at the site of that battlefield was stronger still. It was part spiced wine and part the smoke of incense, and part something which your reeling mind told you wasn’t any kind of scent at all. The interior of the temple was, of course, extraordinary, but by now Balthasar was drunk and dizzy on wonders. Like the rest of the crowd, all he yearned for was to witness the presence of Jesus himself.

There he was, beyond all the sacred gates and hallways, enthroned at very furthest of the vast final court of the Holy of Holies, which Balthasar had no doubt was the largest interior space in the entire known world. Angels swooped amid the ceilings, and huge, strange beasts, part lion and part bird, guarded a stairway of rainbows, but the eye was drawn to the small-seeming man seated at the pinnacle on a coral, emerald and lapis throne.

In one way, Jesus the Christos seemed frail and small, dwarfed by these spectacular surroundings. You noticed that he wore his hair longer than might seem entirely manly, and that his raiments were no whiter than those worn by many in the crowd. Noticed, as well, his plain leather sandals and how, for all that he was past thirty, he still possessed a young man’s thin beard. But at the same time, you knew without thinking he was the source of all the radiance and power which flooded from this city. At first he sat simply gazing down with a kind of sorrowful compassion at the wild cries, prostrations and offerings of the crowd. Then he stood up from his throne and walked down the steps into the masses, and absolute silence fell.

A sense of eternity moved amongst them, and everyone in that great space felt humbled, and judged. It really did seem that some of the dead were resurrected with the touch of a hand, a few quiet words, and that the leprous regained their limbs—but, equally, a few of those who had imagined they had come here in good spirits collapsed as if dead. Then, without the Christos having come close to Balthasar, a clamour of trumpets sounded, and his presence vanished, and the audience was at an end.

Balthasar had come all this way, lived all these years, in search, he now realised, of one undeniable glimpse of the absolute. Just to know that there was something more than the everyday magic—the dirt and demons—of this world. Some blessed certainty. That was all he’d ever wanted. Or so he’d believed. And now, the presence of a supreme being had been demonstrated to him and ten thousand other witnesses in this city of crystal and gold. So why, he wondered as he left the Great Temple with the rest of the milling crowds, did he feel so let down?

There was no way of telling in Jerusalem whether it was day or night. What stars he could see were probably the auras of angels, or glittered amid the impossible architecture which rose all around. But he noticed that a patch of deeper dark had settled at a corner of the Great Temple’s wide outer steps. People were making a wide berth around it, and as curiosity somehow drew him closer he caught a jarringly unpleasant smell. Swarms of flies lifted and encompassed the shape of what he now saw was a man. Here, he thought, was someone so hopelessly sin-ridden as to be beyond even Jesus’ help.

Balthasar felt in his pockets and pouch for what scraps and food and money he had left, and tossed them in the poor creature’s direction. Not that he imagined that such material things would be of much use in this city, but what else could he do? He was turning and pondering if he was likely to find a place to sleep when a preternaturally long arm extended to grab the edge of his robe.

He allowed himself to be pulled back. The man had large brown eyes. He might once have been beautiful, if you ignored the flies and the sores and the rank and terrible smell which emanated from him. He licked his scabbed lips and looked up at Balthasar.

“You know who I am?” he asked in voice in a voice which was a faint whisper, yet echoed in Balthasar’s mind.

Just as in the temple, Balthasar knew and understood. “You are the Christos, the Christ—the same Christ, and yet a different one—as the Christ I have just witnessed perform many wonders in this temple.”

“There is only one Christ,” the man muttered, glancing around at the crowds which were already gathering around them, then up at the various angels which had started to circle overhead. “I am always here.”

“Of course, my Lord, you are all-powerful,” the theologian in Balthasar answered. “You can thus be in many places at once. And in many forms.”

“I can be everywhere, and everything,” Jesus agreed with a slow smile, bearing what blackened teeth he possessed. “What I cannot be is nowhere. Or nothing at all.”

Balthasar nodded. The crowd around them was still growing. “Do you remember me, my Lord? I and two of my friends, we once journeyed…” He trailed off. Of course Jesus knew.

“You brought that deathly unguent as your gift. Perhaps instead of asking me why you did so, Balthasar, as you were thinking of doing, you should ask yourself.”

“My Lord…I still do not know.”

“Why should you?” Jesus shifted his crouch on the temple steps, hooking his thin arms around his even thinner legs as the flies danced around him in a humming cloud. “Any more than you should know why you chose to return. After all, you are only a man.”

Balthasar was conscious of the murmurs of the watching crowd—He is Here. It is as they say. Sometimes He comes in pitiable disguise—and the knowledge that Jesus already understood far more about his thoughts than he was capable of expressing. “I returned, my Lord, simply because I am a man. And because you are a god.”

“The God.”

“Yes.” Balthasar bowed. His voice trembled. “The God.”

“So…Why do you doubt?”

“I do not—”

“Do not try to lie to me!” Suddenly, Jesus the Christ’s voice was like the rumble of rocks. The sky briefly darkened. The circling angels moaned. “You doubt, Balthasar of Persia. Do not ask me why, but you doubt. You look at Me in awe but you cannot see what I am, for if you did, if all was revealed, your mind would be destroyed…Yet, even then, I wonder if you would believe in that instant of knowing? Or even after a million eternities lived amid glories which would make this city seem squalid as the stables in which I was born. Would you believe then?”

“I am sorry, Lord. I simply do not know.” Balthasar blinked. His eyes stung. Terrible though it was, he knew that everything Jesus had said was true. Without this accursed doubt which even now would not leave him, he could not be Balthasar at all.

“I came to this world to bring eternal peace and salvation,” Jesus was saying. “Not just for the Jews, but for all humanity. I was born as you witnessed. My parents fled Herod’s wrath, and I was raised almost as any human child, waiting for the time of my ministry arrive. And when that time came…” He brushed the re-gathering flies from around his eyes. “When it came, I sought knowledge and solace in the wilderness for forty days, just any penitent would…

“I fasted. I prayed. I knew I could bring down the walls of this world, rip the stars from the heavens—indeed, just as you have imagined, Balthasar, in your wilder dreams. Or I could have entered this city as pitiably as you see me now, or as some holy buffoon riding on an ass. I could have done all these things and many others. If, that was, I wished to discover how little compassion the men and women who populate this earth possess. Or perhaps…I could…” The flies were buzzing thicker. The stench seemed to have grown. A different emotion, which might almost have been interpreted as fear, played across the crawling blackness of Jesus’ face. “I could, perhaps, have gathered a small band of followers, performed small deeds, and declared myself in ways which the priests would have found easy to challenge. I could have allowed them to bring about my death. All of these things I could have done so that men such as you, Balthasar, might ultimately choose be redeemed. I could have died in an agony of unheeded screams, Balthasar…” Jesus smiled a sad, bitter smile. “If that was how your gift to me was intended…”

“But you cannot die, my Lord.”

“No…” Jesus picked at a fly from his lips and squashed it between ruined nails. “But I can feel pain. I could have passed through this world as lightly as the wind passes over a field of barley. And human life would have continued almost as you know it now—and worse. Armies would march. People would suffer and starve and doubt my existence whilst others fought over the meaning of my words. Cities of stone and glass even more extraordinary than this one you see around you would rise and fall. Clever men like you, Balthasar, would learn how to fly just as you see these angels flying. Yes, yes, it’s true, although I know it sounds extraordinary. Men would even learn how to pass even beyond the walls of this earth, and how to the poison the air, and the kill the living waters of the oceans. And all for what, Balthasar? What would be accomplished, other than many more lifetimes of pointless striving?”

“I do not know, my Lord.”

“Indeed.” Jesus shook his head. Then he laughed. It was a terrible, empty sound, and the flies stirred from him in a cloud. “Neither did I, Balthasar. Neither did I. And I was hungry in that wilderness, and I was afraid. There were snakes and there were scorpions…And there were other things…” Jesus shuddered. “Far worse. It was in those last days of my torment when it seemed that the very rocks taunted me to transform them into bread, that I finally understood the choice I had to make. I saw all the kingdoms of this earth spread below me, and I knew that I could take dominion of them. All I had to do was to show myself, cast myself from a high point of a temple so that all the angels in the heavens might rescue me. After all…” Jesus shrugged. “I had to make my decision. And this…” He looked at the awestruck crowd, then at the incredible spires and domes. “…is the world I have made.”

Even as Jesus the Christ spoke these last words, Balthasar and the crowd around him could see that he was fading. With him departed the droning flies, and the pestilential stink was replaced by the heady, sacred scents of the temple. He would be somewhere else, or had been in many other places already. Appearing as glowing vision on some hillside, or leading with a tongue of swords at the front of one of his many armies. All that was left of the Christ now was what Balthasar had once feared he might be—just a trick of the light, a baseless hope turned from nothing more than shadow and a last few droning flies.

Balthasar pushed his way down the steps. He walked the golden streets of Jerusalem alone. He’d been thinking before of sleep, but now he knew that he would never find sleep, or any other kind of rest, within this city. It was all too much. It was too glorious. And he was still just a man. Perhaps he would just crumble to dust when all the rest of the believing, undoubting multitudes were resurrected. Sacrilegious though the thought was, it felt welcoming. He passed out through one of the city’s twelve great gates almost without realising, and found his way through the encamped battalions as they joined with choirs of angels in celebration of their inevitable victory. Looking back at the city as the land finally darkened, he wondered once again why an all-powerful God should feel the need to protect it with such large and elaborate defences. Still questions, Balthasar…Pointless doubts…Walking on and away from the blazing light, he realised that what he needed was solitude, silence, clarity.

He was sure that it was fully night now, for his tired eyes caught something resembling the glint of stars in a blessedly black firmament. The ground was rough and dry and dusty. He began to stumble. He grew dizzy. He fell, and lost track of time until light came over him, and he winced and cried out and covered his face in awe, only to discover that it was merely the harsh blaze of the sun. This place truly was a wasteland, and in its way it was terrible. But it was beautiful as well, in the deathless heat-shimmer of its emptiness.

Balthasar walked on through places of stones and dry bones. Then, as evening came, he sought shelter from the sudden cold in a decayed hole at the edge of the mountains. Others had been in this cave before him. There was a sour stench, and there were carvings on the rocks. Squatting on the dark hard ground inside after willing a few sticks to make a fire, Balthasar traced these marks with his fingers. A babble of symbols in different alphabets honouring different gods, all of which he now knew to be misguided. Still, he found these leavings of other seekers after truth oddly comforting.

Some of the most recent markings, he noticed, were written by one hand, and in Aramaic. Studying these scratches more closely in the firelight, he saw that they mimicked the words of the old prophecies which Melchior had once shown him, and he looked around at this squalid place in which he had sought shelter with a different gaze. Somehow, and for all that he had witnessed, it seemed incredible that this decayed hole was the very place in which Jesus Christ had sought shelter in his time in the wilderness. Yet how could he doubt it, after all that he had heard and seen? The writing was loose and ill-composed—you could sense the writer’s anguish—and it terminated in crude series of crosses.

The fire died. Balthasar sat alone in the dark, waiting for the return of the sun, and perhaps for an end to his own torment. He remembered again that first journey he had taken to this land with this two friends, and the subsequent slaughter of the innocents. Jesus had survived to fulfill the prophecies scrawled on these walls, yes. But what of all the others? Was that what his gift of myrrh had foretold, the pointless death of hundreds of children? And why—the question came back to him, although left unasked in Jesus’ presence—had an all-powerful God permitted such a thing to happen? Why had pain and suffering been allowed into this world at all?

In the darkness, Balthasar shook his head. Always the same with you, he heard the Gaspar’s voice saying. You have too many doubts, too many questions. Yet everything he had seen in New Jerusalem had left him unsatisfied.

A slow dawn was coming, rising from the east in gaunt, hot shadow. A cur dog howled. The wind hissed. Looking out across this landscape, Balthasar thought of Jesus squatting in this same cave, and wondered about his last days of torment, and about how he must have felt, and what he had seen, and who had come to bring him ease. Then, as heat rose and the sky whitened, Balthasar took a stick of charcoal from the remnants of his fire and began to make his own marks across the stone. It had been a long time since he had engaged in the practice of serious magic, but the shapes to make the necessary spell of summoning came to him with astonishing ease.

Afterword

The Renaissance writer and philosopher Blaise Pascal’s put forward what has become known as “Pascal’s wager”. He argued that there’s more to be gained in acknowledging and worshiping God than there is in actively denying or ignoring, His existence. If it turns out that God’s there, and you’ve done all the right things and gone to church and so forth, you’ll be patted on the head when you die and sent to heaven. And, if it turns out you’re wrong and he doesn’t exist—well, seeing as there’s probably no afterlife either, you won’t even get the chance to look stupid.

Although I can see the selfish logic in this approach, I’d like to think I’d still hold my ground with Saint Peter if I were to arrive at the pearly gates as a rather surprised atheist, and even if I met with the Big Man Himself, should He agree to discuss the matter with me. To my mind, the kind of God who decides to create this wonderful but clearly imperfect universe with all its injustice and suffering on a whim, and then demand our unquestioning thanks and worship for it, really needs to take a long, serious look at Himself in the mirror.

My problematic relationship with God probably goes back to being forced to attend the Sunday school of a fundamentalist sect known as the Christadelphians when I was a kid—hardly the Taliban, and decent enough people in many ways, but they did insist on taking every word in Bible as the literal truth, which raised many questions and contradictions in my young mind, and left me with a vague recollection of far larger chunks of the scripture than is probably good for me.